6 CEOs Who Founded Their Companies

It's one thing to start a company; it's a completely different experience trying to make sure your “baby” not only thrives but succeeds. There are many stories of company founders who stayed on as CEOs, for better or worse.

One historic and widely-known case was the late Steve Jobs, who founded Apple APPL in 1976, but was forced out as CEO in 1985 – only to return as Apple's chief executive in 1997.

Here are six company founders who have been able to buck the trend and stay on as chief executive:

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Stan Shih – Acer ASIYF

The Taiwan native has always been an innovator. He designed, developed and sold Taiwan's first desktop calculator in 1971 and was later part of a team that came up with the world's first pen watch. Shih co-founded Acer in 1976 with four partners and $25,000.

Under his leadership, Acer became the world's second-largest PC maker. In late 2013, nine years after retiring, Shih was brought back on as Acer chairman and president, to help revive the company's flagging fortunes.

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Jeff Bezos – Amazon AMZN

A computer geek and proud of it, the New Mexico native worked on Wall Street after graduating from Princeton University with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. After working on Wall Street for several years, he founded Amazon.com in 1994. The e-commerce site took off, making Bezos a billionaire. Last year, he purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in cash.

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Michael Dell – Dell

In 1984, when he was 19 years old, Dell founded Dell in his college dorm room with $1,000. With an emphasis on computer design, manufacturing, good prices and better customer support, Dell boomed.

By 1992 Dell became the youngest CEO on the Fortune 500 list. The company is currently the world's third- largest computer hardware manufacturer by revenue. In 2013, after slumping sales, Dell took

his company private – a move he reportedly said would ease the company's transition from PCs to mobile devices.

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Larry Ellison – Oracle ORCL

Ellison founded his computer technology company in 1977, making him one of the world's longest-serving founders and CEOs. Ellison is also one of the world's richest men, and makes no bones about it.

He collects airplanes, yachts, homes and currently owns most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He also put hundreds of millions of dollars into his Team Oracle USA's successful defense of America's Cup last year.

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Dave Duffield – PeopleSoft/Workday WDAY

A Cornell graduate, Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987. As company CEO and chairman, he helped parlay the company's office and financial management systems in the world's second-largest ERP (enterprise resource planning) company. PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle in 2005. Since then Duffield has become the founder and CEO of Workday, which provides cloud-based human resources and financial applications for companies.

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Marc Benioff – Salesforce.com CRM

Benioff started his pioneering, cloud-based company in a San Francisco apartment in 1999. “My vision,” he later blogged, “was to make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the com­plexities of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades.” Salesforce's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application is reportedly used by over 100,000 companies.

And the firm was on the Forbes list of the world's most innovative companies last year.